FISHING ETCETERAS. iig 



From the 'folding-up' point of view, at any rate, the inflated 

 rubber boat eclipses in portability its rival, the Welsh Coracle, 

 said to be the earliest floating vehicle in the British Islands. 

 A frame of ash-laths, bent into the shape of an elongated 

 walnut-shell, some four feet long by three feet wide, is covered 

 with pitched canvas— the seat, adjusted with a view to equih- 

 brium, occupying a central position right across the middle. 

 What the coracle is now, is probably — to judge by old records — 

 for all intents and purposes what it was a thousand years ago 

 (and who can say how many thousands before that?). A 

 Welsh chronicler, Giraldus de Barri, writes that he crossed the 

 Towey (presumably in a coracle) in 1188, whilst preaching the 

 Crusades in Wales in company with Archbishop Baldwin, and 

 that the boats they (the Welsh) ' employ in fishing or in getting 

 over rivers are made of twigs, they (the boats) not oblong, ncr 

 pointed, but almost round, or rather triangular, covered within 

 and without with raw hides.' [Now canvass painted or pitched.] 

 ' When a salmon, thrown into one of these boats, strikes it 

 hard with his tail, he often oversets it, and endangers both the 

 vessel and the man.' ' 



This beats the hitherto undefeated record of the Mullingar 

 boats, which were described by my dear old friend Dr. Peard, 

 in his * Year of Liberty,' as ^perfectly safe provided you didn't 

 cough or sneeze '! ... It is seldom that the medio tutissimus 

 ibis maxim finds more apt illustration. 



It appears, however, that they can manage, on occasion, to 

 get two people into one of these ' tarred clothes-baskets,' as a 

 ducked cockney once sarcastically described the nautilus of 

 Wales. Whether either of these navigators could really wield 

 and cast with a salmon rod ^ and a fly is a problem in hydro- 

 statics I have never presumed personally to solve, but that 



' Annals and Antiquities of the Counties and County Families of Wales. 

 Longmans, Green, Reader, & Co., 1872. 



2 Thousands of salmon have been killed with rod and fly out of coracles — 

 but with only one man in the coracle. It requires long practice and clever- 

 ness to do it ; guiding the coracle and minding the rod at the same time is 

 not easy. — Ed. 



